This article examines issues raised by a recent UK legal case in which the defense argued that the accusations made by the highly hypnotizable plaintiff were likely based on false memories. The authors argue that the evidence related to hypnotizability and false memory production is inconsistent but may be illuminated by a sociocognitive perspective. They present 2 preliminary studies that indi...

This study was designed to assess jury decision-making for 289 participants reading a medical malpractice vignette as a function of participant type (undergraduate students or jury panelists), punitive damage award apportionment (none, half, or all to the plaintiff), and compensation previously assigned to the plaintiff (low, medium, or high). We found several sample differences. Overall, jury ...

Daniela Stallone Assistant Vice President, Claims Medical Liability Mutual Insurance Company The cases presented in this issue involve the legal doctrine of the “loss of chance.” The plaintiffs in both cases alleged that the negligence of, and delay in diagnosis by, the treating physician was a “substantial factor” in causing their injuries. Expert testimony for the plaintiff will often state t...

Litigation seems to be a Pareto-inefficient outcome of pretrial bargaining; however, this paper shows that litigation can be the outcome of rational behavior by a litigant and her attorney. If the attorney has more information than his client concerning the characteristics of the lawsuit, the client can use litigation as a way of extracting information. I show that, counterintuitively, litigati...

Litigation seems to be a Pareto-inefficient outcome of pretrial bargaining; however, this paper shows that litigation can be the outcome of rational behavior by a litigant and her attorney. If the attorney has more information than his client concerning the characteristics of the lawsuit, the client can use litigation as a way of extracting information. I show that, counterintuitively, litigati...

This paper studies an economic model of the Negligence rule and considers litigation between a defendant and a plaintiff, under the assumption that the plaintiff may not perfectly observe the defendant’s action ex post. We consider the noiseless case as a benchmark that the plaintiff perfectly observes the defendant action ex post. We show in the noiseless case that the defendant surely takes c...